


Saw your name on the board

by Justafewthingstosay



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: A lot of lonely themes in this one, Do not even trip, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Doubt, Spoilers for 158, This is not going to have a happy ending, childhood neglect
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25211980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Justafewthingstosay/pseuds/Justafewthingstosay
Summary: Michael Shelley is being thrown out of his flat.Elias Bouchard is so lonely in house that he has the feeling he is going insane.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Michael Shelley, Michael Shelley/ Original Elias Bouchard
Comments: 14
Kudos: 37





	Saw your name on the board

**Author's Note:**

> Soo, I came up with this idea in VC one night..  
> And it kinda went from there..  
> I hope you enjoy!

This story began with a fight, like so many things in life do. One thing has to end before another can begin, that is just the way of the world. People fight, people scream, people tend to interrupt others and say things that they don’t really mean. 

People tend get loud and shou-

“YOU’RE THROWING ME OUT?” Michael yelled, he hadn’t meant to get loud, he really hadn’t, but he couldn’t stop himself. “You can’t be serious right now.”   
  


“Michael, you haven’t paid your rent in two months, it’s not like you’re leaving me a choice, man,” Vincent said with a pained smile.

Michael knew that he shouldn’t push his luck. Vincent had already been way too nice to him, so he just let himself fall to a chair and drop his head into his hands, his hair falling out of the loose bun. 

“Alright, I get it,” he mumbled in a defeated tone, before looking up at the other man again.

“I’m giving you two weeks until you have to leave,”

All of the pained acceptance left him at that moment, as he jumped up and ran his hands furiously through his hair. “TWO WEEKS? How am I supposed to find a flat in two weeks in London?”

Vincent only sighed. “I don’t know, you figure it out.” 

And with that, Vincent left.

And Michael was alone. Alone in a flat that he would have to leave soon. He knew that he had not been the greatest tenant. He really did, he often came home late, he used to stay up into the earliest hours in the morning when he was still in uni and he sometimes forgot how loud he was. 

He could count himself lucky that it wasn’t happening sooner, but as he looked onto the window sill, where his various house plants stood, he noticed how final that was. He would have to leave this place if he wanted to or not.

No matter how much it felt like home, it wasn’t his home anymore.

With a sigh, he laid down on the floor, looking at the white ceiling that he had always wanted to repaint, but wasn’t going to get the time to now. 

He closed his eyes before the tears could fall. He was going to deal with finding a new flat, but not right now. Now he was going to let himself be sad. He was going to mourn. 

Tomorrow, he would start. 

Today, he would think about the days, the memories that he had made in this place. He knew that he wasn’t going to lose them just because he would move, but it felt like it. 

It felt like the last thing in his life, his last anchor tethering him to his old student days, was finally gone. 

He had to accept that he was a man with an actual job now.

But he’d deal with that later. 

Right now, on this Tuesday afternoon, he would rather just lie on the floor and let everything pass.

These things were problems for future Michael.

* * *

  
Coincidentally to Michael lying on the floor of his flat, someone pinned a piece of paper onto the pinboard in the Magnus Institute. 

This someone was a man named Elias Bouchard. A filing assistant in the Magnus Institute, not really because he had to, but because he was bored. 

Bored with all the free time he had on his hands now that he was out of uni.

So, yeah. Elias had been working for the Magnus Institute for around half a year now. He had thought that maybe the job would help fill the loneliness in his soul, but it turns out that you do not tend to meet a lot of people as a filing assistant. 

He didn’t really have any friends to speak off, and, in the institute, he would sometimes work for hours without really encountering anyone else. The students tended to only come up to him when they had a question about where things were and did not want to stick around to have a conversation. So it was just him and his files most of the days. 

His parents had been disappointed with him when he had picked up the job at the institute. But that wasn’t really a new thing, his parents tended to be disappointed with everything he did. When he finished his degree from Christ Church, the first thing he got to hear was his father asking why it was only a third-class honours degree and not anything better. 

He had tried to explain himself, but there was never any point in doing so, so he stopped complaining.    
  


They didn’t complain when he asked to move into the house that they had in SE London. It was for the best. After moving back to London from Oxford, Elias hadn’t wanted to stay with his parents again, and he had the feeling that they didn’t want him back either. 

His father had wanted him to write a book, about philosophy or something, or go into economics and become one of those people on Oxford street that went jogging during their lunch break and found fulfilment in trading the stocks of millionaires around, hoping to make them even more money, only for them to be paid not even a fraction of the money that they worked with daily.

No, that was nothing for him. He wanted something interesting, something new, something that he didn’t know about or hadn’t heard of. When he found the Magnus Institute, he was enthralled. 

So much knowledge, about things that people didn't think were real. He had always been someone that was intrigued with the paranormal, ever since he stayed up late at night, his torch in his hand while he tried to fill the loneliness of his childhood with reading about ghosts, about groups of friends, about things that he had never experienced.

To Elias Bouchard, friendship and love were about as real as ghosts and monsters. They didn’t exist. 

But he wanted to change that. He wanted to try. He couldn’t sit in his house anymore, the loneliness chilling him to the bone while he tried to fill the empty void with television and music, with books and art. 

Sometimes, even those things that normally gave him comfort hurt him deeper. There was something fundamentally lonely and sad about not being able to speak to people about the things that you experience. 

He had been playing with the thought of getting a pet, a cat for example, so that he could at least have someone to come home to, but then again, the thought of just a young man living alone with his cat wasn’t really someone that screamed “Hey I am super fulfilled in the friends’ department. I am super not lonely.” 

So, no pet. 

He was sure that he would be lonely in the house forever until the night before, when he had read a book so boring that he didn’t even remember the title, but it started with someone looking for a flatmate. 

And that was when it hit him. He had a three-story home with a lot of rooms in London. A housemate would make it less lonely and it was less responsibility than a pet, as well. 

He made the decision on a Wednesday night, his book abandoned on the couch, as he ran to his shitty computer to write and print a page with info. 

He decided on only one housemate, he didn’t want to overdo it, in case it went badly, so he printed only 2 copies.    
  
One he would hang onto the Magnus Institute’s pinboard and the other he was going to hang onto the pinboard in the coffee shop that was close to the Institute. 

It was enough, he thought. From what he heard, people were always looking for flats and he could have an interview with the interested people first, to make sure that they weren’t absolutely terrible.

So, he just pinned the thin paper to the cork, not knowing how important that paper would be, or how important it would be that he put it in the institute. 

How important it would be that the coffee shop didn’t have any thumbtacks anymore, so that he decided to just come back on Monday to hang it up there. 

He didn’t know any of that yet, as he turned his back to the pinboard that would change his life. 

* * *

  
  
  


The next morning, an archival assistant was bored and stressed at the same time. He knew that he had work to do and should do it, but his brain kept floating to the issue of his flat. Therefore, he barely got anything done, nothing really.

So, when he made his way out of the institute, knowing full and well that he hadn’t worked on any of the files that were given to him and hadn’t called any of the people that he was supposed to follow up on, he felt terrible.

He didn’t really know where to start looking for a flat, he had found the previous one over his one college friend, but he couldn’t just call her up after a few years and ask her to please find him a new flat. Please, he had at least a little shred of dignity. 

So he figured that he would just look through every newspaper, every ad and maybe even those horrible realtor shops that he sometimes saw. 

Maybe, just maybe one of those might have something. 

As he made his way past Rosie, the receptionist that had started about a week or two ago, and that he didn’t think was any older than nineteen, he stopped to say goodbye. He knew how horrible it was to start a new job where you knew no one, so he had made it one of his rituals to at least go and check on her before he left.

It turned out though that he wasn’t the only one here on that day. He saw Emma, a fellow archival assistant, talk to Rosie as the receptionist handed her a bunch of papers. 

He put his arm up in a small wave as he saw the two women, happy that he wasn’t the only one trying to keep Rosie company. 

“Oh, Michael!” Emma grinned, as she nodded at him, pulling a piece of paper from the pile and handing it to him. “Would you do me a favour and pin this to the pinboard when you leave? A friend from college has a band and they have their first proper gig soon, so I said I would do some advertisement,” her grin seemed to get even wider as Michael took the paper into his hand. 

“Yeah, no worries. You doing alright, Rosie? Or is Emma forcing you to use office supplies to print her ads, which would be understandable, but still,” he smiled at Rosie, completely ignoring Emma, who was still talking next to him.

  
He had learnt that it was best to ignore Emma, sometimes. For your own health and safety.

“Oh, she was, but it’s okay. Don’t worry,” she smiled back at him, before she put her hand into a small bowl, producing a thumbtack. “Sometimes the ones at the pinboard are empty, just saving you the extra trip back to my desk.” 

He thanked her, before he left her with a babbling Emma. He would normally take that particular burden on himself, but not today. 

He was just going to pin this to the pinboard and then be fine with it. Stop by the corner store to buy most of the newspapers that had small personal ads in them, and then spend the evening circling them before falling into his bed, before he lost his mind.

The one issue that he encountered first was the fact that the pinboard was completely full. 

The thought of just taking one of the other papers away to put Emma’s old friend’s band ad on it felt wrong, especially while he didn’t even know what the papers said, so he decided to read through a few of them. 

Most of them were very recent, some were just general information about the Institute that got updated. 

Not a single one of them looked like it was outdated enough for him to just take off and throw away.

And then he got to the bottom left corner of the board, where a page was placed perfectly in the corner so that it wasn’t touching or overlapping any other paper. As his eyes fell on it, he immediately felt himself light up.

It was an ad, but not just any ad. It was an ad for a house share, by someone who apparently worked at the Institute, which made everything even better. 

With a careful hand, Michael took off the paper and replaced it with the one Emma had just given him.

“Well, Elias Bouchard. It seems like I’m going to have to give you a call,” he mumbled, rereading the paper once again. 

Michael didn’t stop smiling the entire tube ride home. 


End file.
